Just this guy, you know?

I’m keeping it. I’m not sure I need to say more really. It’s an excellent device with some flaws in the software that fingers crossed will get fixed.

In the last week I’ve been using it as much as I think I used my laptop and tablet beforehand. Writing these posts, Chromecasting stuff to the TV, tweaking and updating servers. It’s handled everything very well. The battery life is great. Especially as I’m using it more like a laptop and my Lenovo has about 2 hours of light use in it.

I’ve had the Pixel C for three days and I have to say I love it! I’ve done all my non gaming “computing” on it. It’s handled it really well!

Browsing the web has been really nice. Obviously some websites are just intrinsically shit like Tesco but everything else has worked well. On occasion I’ve accidentally clicked a link when I meant to scroll which was quite annoying but it just takes a bit of time to get used to touching a tabtop screen. A very nice surprise was that CTRL+T opens a new tab in Chrome.

The Pixel C arrived today. I read a new review that was quite disparaging about it this morning (before I had mine). Like most reviews it complained about flaky keyboard and WiFi connections, poor app experiences and general poor performance.

Well, I’ve been playing with it for two and a half hours so far and as far as I can tell these problems don’t exist! Or at least I’ve got the magic Pixel C that doesn’t suffer from the problems reviewers seem to find.

I’ve wanted to replace my laptop for some time now. It’s a Lenovo U300s from 2012 and it has done a valiant job. I’ve tried countless Linux distros on it, done mountains of University work on it and lugged it all over the place.

These days my usage has changed. I don’t code on it. I don’t need to take it to University to do work. I use it to browse the web and to administer the few servers I’ve got running. I can do all of this from my tablet, at least in theory.

On Saturday I finally went to a tournament at Patriot Games in Sheffield. I double booked myself so missed the Regionals there early this year.

I took a bog standard Pre-Paid Kate deck and a HB:EtF Mega Server deck which ultimately was there to score out but hoped to pull of a Marcus Batty and NEXT Gold combo. I took Kate because she’s so damn reliable! Up until the morning of the tournament I was going to take a connections Andromeda deck but changed back to my Kate deck purely because she gets set up faster. Kate is even better when you remember to trigger her ability.

My friend Ben and I went to our very first Netrunner tournament on Saturday. It was being run by Quinns (the one from Shut Up and Sit Down) in the Loading Bar in Dalston.

The day started off at 06:30 and getting a 08:29 train from Sheffield to LONDON. That went swimmingly. A lovely woman sat next to us and was fairly interested in Ben’s last minute deck building. We got some food and headed to Dalston. We foolishly didn’t check the engineering works and the tube took us one stop before we had to walk.

I finally did it! I played Netrunner with people who I don’t live with (Ben basically lives here) and it was great!

Ben, Jon and I spent a couple of hours running at Patriot Games last night. We had a great time and I think we’ll all go again, probably making it a weekly event.

I’ve got a few observations on why it was such an enjoyable evening.

It was chilled. No one there was playing super bullshit NBN Fast Advance decks. No one got tilted and grumpy. No one was a cock.

I’ve been sitting on this review for about a month but haven’t published it because I wanted to get some nice photos of the game in action. Looks like that’s not going to happen any time soon so fuck it, you can probably look up some images on Google or Board Game Geek.

I fairly impulsively bought Pagoda after hearing about it on the Shut Up and Sit Down podcast and I am pretty sure it was a good idea.

Skull* is probably the perfect game. It’s certainly perfect to play in pubs. You don’t even need to buy it because you can make it with a pen and some beer mats.

Each player has four cards/tiles/beer mats. Three cards have roses on them, the other has a skull. The cards are played face down. The aim of the game is to flip over roses whilst avoiding skulls. The first person to win two rounds wins the game.

I like trains. I like the look of trains. I like the sound of trains. I like travelling on trains. I sometimes want to build my own railway network. So I obviously like games about trains. Therefore I own Ticket To Ride and have played it a fair bit. If you’re not familiar with Ticket To Ride, it’s a board game based on collecting sets of cards which you use to build a rail network across the USA. It’s quite fun. But recently I picked up a new game about trains. It’s called Trains.